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How to Track a Major Gift: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1681606
Major gifts are important for your organization, after all, they're often some of your largest donations! So how do you track these important donations in PatronManager?
Since major gifts are often paid in more than one installment, we recommend using Pledges (and Pledge Payments) to keep things consistent and simplify reporting.
Before you begin, you'll do some light configuration to ensure that Pledges are enabled and ready for your organization's specific moves management process. Once that one-time setup is complete, entering and tracking a major gift through each "move" in your process is super easy!
In this article, we'll focus on the day to day process of entering and tracking a major gift via Pledges and Pledge Payments.
At the end, we have some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), including tips on reporting. Let's jump in!
Entering & tracking major gifts
Here, we'll walk through an example of tracking a major gift through a typical moves management cultivation process in PatronManager.
Show me how!
Let's walk through entering a major gift for Wendy Darling, starting from the initial entry into PatronManager. At this point, we've already identified Wendy as a prospect based on her visits to our organization, a score from WealthEngine, or other factors, and we're working on cultivating a relationship with her.
First you'll create the Pledge Donation record for this major gift in PatronManager. This allows you to track outreach and conversations with your donor all in one place.
Later, you'll be able to refer back to this record to see all the actions that led to the successful ask (or, in case of an unsuccessful ask, you'll have insight into what to do differently next time).
Q: But wait, they haven't pledged anything yet!
A: That's ok! Because you completed the initial configuration to use Pledges with Moves Management, you'll use the Stage to show exactly where this future ask is in your pipeline. Follow along below!
You may notice a Donation Record Type in your account called Major Gift, but we now recommend using Pledges instead.
It's difficult to change a Major Gift to a Pledge without negatively impacting your reports, and you often won't know at the start whether the donation will eventually be paid in a single installment or multiple. It's better to be consistent and always use Pledges for consistent tracking across all your major gift initiatives.
1. On the prospect's Contact record, click the New Pledge action
If you don't see this action, make sure you've completed all the configuration steps.
If you're tracking a major gift from a business, you can use the New Pledge action on the Account. Otherwise, we recommend starting from the Contact.
2. Fill out the necessary information
- Donation Name: Give your Major Gift a name! We recommend using a naming convention for Major Gifts that works for your organization.
- Account Name: this will autofill based on the action.
- Donor: this will autofill based on the action.
- Pledge Amount: optional at this stage - you can enter an estimate or leave it blank for now. You'll be able to edit it later!
- Close Date: this is required, but you'll be able to change it later. Enter the date that you estimate this Major Gift would close, or the latest date that you would keep this Major Gift open.
- Stage: Select the Stage that best fits where you are in your process with this donor. At this point it's likely going to be something like Prospecting or Cultivation.
- Save!
You will have customized the Stage options during your moves management configuration, so if you need to make changes, check with your team and refer to the steps here.
3. Click the Pledge name in the green banner to open the record
You can also find it in the Donations related list later!
4. Optionally, enter other fields
If your organization uses Funds, Campaigns, or other custom fields, you may wish to edit those now. Don't worry, you can always come back later (and you will, multiple times).
As you work with this donor, as we're doing with Wendy, you can track details right on the Pledge record to keep it all in one place.
Refer to our article on moves management cultivation for an overview of the kinds of actions you might take, and refer back to your moves management strategy to define your steps!
Here are just a few examples of what a moves management process might look like!
Fields on the Pledge record
The Description field is a text field that you can use to track key notes about this gift and the donor. Best of all, this field is reportable, so it's great to store information that you'd like to later pull into reports! Other fields, like Campaign, can be useful for tracking as well.
In this example we're using Path, a Salesforce feature that lets you highlight key fields and guidance at each Stage. Learn more about that in our configuration guide here!
Chatter
Chatter is a great tool to collaborate with your team right on the Pledge record. This ensures that you know which gift you're talking about at any given time. You can even add files!
Activities
Straight from the Pledge record, you can:
- Email: Send an email to your donor
- Log a Call: Record a recap of a phone conversation (or real-life conversation!) with your donor
- New Task: Set up a Task for yourself or someone on your team related to this record to reach out to the donor, schedule a lunch, etc.
- New Event: Set up an Event for yourself to put on your Calendar in PatronManager, like a scheduled meeting with this donor
Stage
As you go through your moves management process, make sure to update the Stage on the record accordingly! Are you ready to ask your donor for this gift? Update the Stage to Solicitation. Is the donor thinking about this gift and hasn't gotten back to you yet? Change the Stage to Ask - Under Review.
Not only will this help you keep track of where you are in the Major Gift process with your donor, it'll also ensure that this is transparent for your whole team.
And more
If you find out that you'll receive this Major Gift sooner (or later!) than you originally expected, or need to update the Pledge Amount, you can do so throughout the process!
As we noted earlier, you can refer to our article on moves management cultivation for an overview of the kinds of actions you might take, and refer back to your moves management strategy to define your steps!
How you close out your Pledge will depend on whether your donor has decided to give or not.
If your donor decides to give
Update the Stage to Pledged, make sure the Pledge Amount is accurate, and update the Close Date to reflect when you expect the Pledge to be paid in full.
Or if you're not using Path, you can also update it directly here:
From there, you'll handle the Payments and update the Stage just as you would for any other Pledge - jump over to our article on Pledges (specifically, the section on creating Pledge Payments) for all the details on how to accurately record that revenue!
If your donor opts to not give
- Update the Stage to Closed Lost
- Add notes in Chatter and/or the Description field to help you reflect on what led to this outcome, so you can adjust your approach next time!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
For the most part, you'll report on these Pledges similar to how you report on any other donations. But because of the way Pledges work, there are a few key things to keep in mind for your reporting - like using the Pledge Amount field rather than the regular Amount field.
We've got tips on Pledge reporting in our Pledges article here.
If you use PatronPortal, your donors won't see any donation until it reaches a Probability of 90%.
That means only Pledges with one of the following Stages will appear in PatronPortal:
- Ask - Accepted
- Negotiation/Review
- Pledged
- Closed Won
Since any of these Stages would come after you ask your donor for the gift, it shouldn't be a surprise to them if they see it in PatronPortal!
If you'd like to, you can set up custom automated reminders for Pledges using Flow. Salesforce will be your best resource for more information on Flow.
Some common Flows include:
- An Email Alert to notify you when a Pledge has been stuck at a certain Stage for a period of time
- A Task assigned to you when a Pledge moves to the Solicitation Stage
- An Email Alert to let your Executive Director know when a Pledge has moved to the Pledged Stage
To help set you up for success, we’ve put guidelines together to help you avoid interfering with PatronManager functionality, corrupting your data, and to prevent negative impacts to your customizations due to PatronManager product upgrades.
Salesforce has a feature called Path where you can create a guide for your users through the Stages of a gift. While Salesforce created Path originally for sales, this feature can be very useful for moves management, too! You can see some examples of Path in our example images above.
Learn more about Path in our moves management configuration guide here!